Research Spotlight – NCDIR technology at work to assist researchers in the understanding RNA pol II repression

NCDIR researchers helped determine the molecular architecture of RNA polymerase II bound to the protein Gdown1, an essential transcriptional repressor that is specific to multicellular animals (metazoans). The labs at NCDIR performed the cross-linking with mass spectrometry readout (Chait Lab) and integrative structural modeling (Sali Lab) to complement the the cryo-electron microscopy map and biochemical data of Prof Robert G Roeder’s Lab, to elucidate the structural mechanism that Gdown employs to repress RNA pol II, an enzyme Prof Roeder discovered almost 50 years ago in 1969!